Who

Dis Guy Walks Into A Bar...

My co-writer and I have somewhat different approaches towards games of
questionable value. He approaches gaming a bit like a “catch and release”
fisherman, constantly buying the newest games on a whim, playing them for a
couple of days, and then selling them on eBay in a week if they don’t work
out. I, on the other hand, agonize over each and every purchase, determined to
hold on to my hard-earned cash to the last second.

This has its downsides. One of them is that I hardly ever sell games. If the
game is good that’s fine, but I even put the bad games on the shelf, lovingly
enclosed in their pristine cases, so that I can enjoy not ever playing them
again. It’s a bit of a sickness.

However, my buying pattern has its upsides, too. My co-blogger doesn’t just
buy too many games, he actually buys them twice. So every so often I get a
free game. It’s charity, like that given to a beggar scratching at the back
door of Marie Antoinette’s pastry chef.

Last week, he bought Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness for the PSP, so I got
his copy of the PS2 version of the game, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. It has
taken over my life, and invaded my dreams. Perhaps by writing about it a bit I
can get it out of my head.

I initially approached Disgaea based on my first impression: as a lighter,
stupider version of Fire Emblem. “I’ll play the first ten missions and give it back to him,” I
thought.

Disgaea seemed quite trivial. The lead character, Laharl – a juvenile demon
prince trying to claim the throne – was likeable enough, but the game
mechanics themselves weren’t comfortable. I didn’t like the way the characters
felt like they moved on invisible roller skates, the “geo effects” system
seemed trivial and too easy to abuse, and there was something fundamentally
odd about the input method in the game. You could cancel characters movements
after they participated in an attack, which rubbed my Panzer General-trained
self the wrong way. It all just seemed shoddy. By the time I reached the
“boss” at the end of the first chapter, I was ready to throw in the towel. My
characters were all too weak, and the thought of grinding them all through the
earlier maps in that chapter just seemed monotonous in the extreme. However,
just as I was about to give up I had three separate epiphanies in close
succession.

First, I realized the limit for the number of characters one can create (and
bring with you) is incredibly large. You can generate over a hundred
characters, and bring any ten with you on to any map. I had been playing with
just 5 characters total.

Second, I realized that the odd “cancel movement” behavior allows you to have
characters who can run out, join in a joint attack (gaining some experience in
the process), and then return to the loving bosom of the perfectly safe “base
tile.”

Lastly, I realized that the “main campaign” of the game is a complete
sideshow, and all of the fun is concentrated in the so-called “Item World”
which is the Being John Malcovich dimension that exists inside every object in
the universe. It seems that inside every object in the universe (such as
swords, shoes, and little bits of fluff) are monsters, and teachers, and
valuable items. Fighting your way through the Item World makes the object
you’re inside of more powerful. In more prosaic terms, the “Item World” is a
potentially unlimited set of random maps. It’s where you will probably spend
most of your time while playing Disgaea.

Regarding this last point, this is completely backwards from the way most
games of this sort are structured. Typically, lots of care and thoughtful
level design goes into the main campaign, and the random battles are for the
freaks who just can’t get enough. In Disgaea, it’s the reverse: the “formal”
levels are pretty flat, but the random levels range from “sort of boring” to
“completely and gleefully insane.” This mostly has do with the “geo effects”
system and how the game awards bonus points.

A huge color chain in Disgaea 2

It’s like this: sometimes, some of the squares on a map will be brightly
colored. There are pyramids which grant special powers or penalties to anyone
standing on a square of that color. Furthermore, if you destroy a pyramid when
it is on a different color, it changes all squares of that color into the
pyramid’s color, dealing damage in the process. So perhaps you have a red
pyramid on a yellow square. You smash the red pyramid. All of the yellow
squares turn red. Across the board, there was a blue pyramid on a yellow
square. When that square turns red, it blows up the blue pyramid, which then
causes all the now-red squares to turn blue.

Essentially, it’s a sort of platonic implementation of a Rube Goldberg
machine. That may sound contradictory, but when you see it in action, you’ll
agree.

If you can manage to chain together a number of these explosions, you accrue a
ridiculous amount of bonus points. Some of the bonus points lead to experience
point awards, which are given generously to any of your characters who are on
the map when you kill the last enemy.

That last paragraph is key. Consider that the typical “grind loop” in an RPG
looks like this: recruit a new, sucky character. Throw him into battle. Watch
him die. Resurrect him. Throw him into battle again. Watch him die. Resurrect
him. Repeat this until your spirit is crushed and you want to fly to Japan to
stab someone in the neck. Eventually, your loser character gets lucky and
reaches level 2, and now only dies 90% of the time, instead of 95% of the
time. In Disgaea, the most effective levelling strategy for your weak
characters is to make sure they don’t fight. Rather, you send out your most
powerful character and have him kill everyone except one enemy. Then you bring
out your weaklings, keeping them far away from the remaining enemy. Finally,
you set off a chain reaction of fireworks, accruing bonus points and (often)
killing the one remaining enemy. The end result is that your weak characters
gain experience points for standing around picking their noses.

Some call this insanity. I call it brilliant. It transforms the nature of
the level grind from an exercise in careful balancing to a full-on heedless
plunge to find the toughest level that your best character can take on by
himself (or, if you’re feeling frisky, with one or two assistants). It also
means that you spend your time playing only levels that have that ineffable
puzzle nature. Occasionally, I encounter a level without any geo effects. I
typically stroll off of those levels without even bothering to kill a single
enemy. After all, I’m playing a Demon Prince. Why bother? What’s in it for
me?

The odd thing about the Item World, from my perspective, is that the game does
its level best to downplay it. “Oh, yeah, and this other thing is over here.
You can do it if you want. But, really, don’t worry about it.”

After a solid week of playing through the item world every night, all of my
dreams featured colored squares which gave the various dream figures different
magic powers.

However brilliant the core conceit, if you’re playing on the PS2 you should
anticipate at least one problem: the game was designed by savants, but they
were idiot savants, because it has an utterly retarded save
system that doesn’t support
save anywhere. On the PSP you at least have instant suspend to partially
shield you from this idiocy. No such luck for us poor PS2 players.

And the best part, of course, is that I didn’t even have to pay for the game.
Now I just need to convince psu that he likes the Disgaea games as much as
Madden. Then I’ll get a new
free Disgaea game every year.